ValveSoftware
Warframe Shader Caching
This is a Proton-version-agnostic issue, more (assumedly) on the Steam-side of things. Shader Pre-Caching is a great feature, but for Warframe specifically (a couple others come to mind, but none as egregious as Warframe) it is utterly broken, downloading and compiling new shader caches daily unless the Shader Pre-Caching option is completely disabled. This used to be a couple hundred MB, but has ballooned to 14GB of daily downloads, that don't seem connected to any updates of the game itself. At that size Vulkan shader processing also takes massive amounts of time, each time. The issue has been raised in various places, Steam Community, Warframe Forums, Reddit, some of these going back two years. Whether there are video files erroneously being re-downloaded, or some other major bug, this is a wholly unnecessary stress for the Valve servers and client PC's.
This was better for a short time, now it's back to multi GB shader cache downloads daily, and hours of compiling them. Can I suggest adding an option per game in the properties to disable shader caching individually? There are a bunch of games where it just isn't necessary, at least not at the frequency that this (automated?) system is doing them.
I only started noticing this today, but it's a severe issue. Had to turn off background pre-caching just to ensure I wasn't drowning my storage.
Any fixes for this? This is still a currently occuring problem. I keep deleting the shading cache only for it to download 80GB of cache all over again just for one game.
I don't think there is a Fossilize fix. Only real "fix" is to block this game on Steam's end, but that's outside my control.
I've set up a cronjob to remove all shader cache files older than 90 days, and it kept this under control. It looks like only those games are affected which are MMOs and use lots of visual effects, e.g. Path of Exile did this for me. Sometimes, this will trigger Steam to download some older files again, tho.
